Word: babbler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...often that a new bird is discovered--worldwide, it happens maybe once a year. Bugun Liocichla, a breed of babbler that scientist types will come to know as Liocichla bugunorum, last week officially became the first bird discovered in India in more than a half-century. Ramana Athreya, a professional astronomer and amateur ornithologist in the northeastern part of the country, captured two of the birds--which take their name from the local Bugun tribe--in May, but the find had to be vetted by the scientific community before it became official. Since the species is so rare, Athreya...
HMMM... The Babbler ($50) and foreign-language videos may introduce infants to a few sounds and words, but a language has to be spoken in the home for kids to become bilingual...
...respect accorded any high-ranking political hopeful. In fact, I have been looking into getting it into the presidential debates but with no luck as yet. We have witnessed a serious step in the evolution of computer consciousness. While we cannot really think of a computer running this "babbler" program as having a fully human-like intelligence, we can consider it to be a viable presidential candidate. Well, to be fair, this "artificial" candidate has one major advantage over its flesh-and-blood cousin--with a flick of a switch its inane babbling is silenced...
...here in this column I present the first public Greenleaf Test. The following quotations have come from two different sources, one an unnamed presidential candidate (hint: I made the test as easy as I could without lowering the bar below the two party system), and the other a simple "babbler" computer program (CS-51 students might recognize this program as the Markov-based babbler of assignment 8). I allowed the program to use some general text from the congressional record so that it might "learn" the fine nuances of political rhetoric. And here, in no particular order, are the quotations...
...secret trip to Moscow in 1972 marked my introduction to the use of the "babbler." This was a cassette tape I had brought with me, which played a bizarre recording of what seemed like several dozen voices talking gibberish simultaneously. If I wanted to confer with my colleagues without being overheard by listening devices, we would gather around the babbler, speaking softly among ourselves. Theoretically anyone listening in would be unable to distinguish the real conversation from the cacophony of recorded voices. Whether it worked or not we could never be sure. The only certainty was that anyone trying...